A group that organizes an annual and controversial anti-police brutality march that last year was the scene of more than 200 arrests says it had nothing do with an attack by vandals early Saturday that left 11 Montreal police squad cars smashed and a neighbourhood police station splashed with graffiti.
And Sophie Sénécal of the Collectif opposé à la brutalité policière said yesterday she hoped police won't use the incident as a pretext to adopt a "provocative" attitude during this year's march to protest against police brutality, which is scheduled to take place tomorrow.
"For sure, it's something we'd worry about," she said. "We just hope that the police ... don't make some cause-and-effect link between an isolated incident and the demonstration." Sénécal's comments follow an assault by vandals at a little after 12 a.m. yesterday on a Montreal police station used by the department's traffic division.
About 20 hooded individuals dressed in black and carrying rocks, baseball bats and, in at least one instance, a hammer, damaged 11 squad cars, slashing tires and smashing vehicle windows and the vehicles' computers.
The windows of the station house, at Dominion and Notre Dame Sts., were also broken and painted with grafitti slogans including FTP and ACAB. Early yesterday, a Montreal police spokesperson described the acronyms as echoing those seen at "certain demonstrations." "They're tags," Constable Yannick Ouimet told Radio-Canada. "In one case it means 'F--- the Police' and in other, 'All Cops Are Bastards.' We can believe that the group that was here ... is one we see at certain demonstrations in Montreal." Later yesterday, however, police had tempered their assessment of who might be responsible for the damages.
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